Posted
by
Zonk
on Sunday December 30, 2007 @04:34PM
from the getting-your-frag-on-the-cheap dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."

One thing I can say for OpenArena and Nexuiz is that they're both really fun. They might not have top-shelf graphics, but the games are fast-paced, usually pretty free from cheaters and other asshats, and just a lot of fun to play. I play Nexuiz pretty frequently. I'm not a huge fan of Sauerbraten, but that's mostly because there's only a few servers, and I get tired of instagib. I'm really excited to try the others on the list...

...coming back to frag you once more! I do like World of Padman...funny story, funny graphics....aw heck...funny game. Community 3d games are actually a lot more fun when they try to be themselves (original, don't have to conform to much of the real deal), look at Bz-flag....crap graphics...still fun as h*** to play and there are still hundreds of servers with thousands of players playing it.

Why is it that open source so often implies a total lack of care for details and usability?

Lack of natural selection. If a commercial game's user interface sucks, few people will buy and play it, unless its overly hyped. Reviewers tear apart the game, word of mouth names it a real stinker, it doesn't sale, developer either goes bankrupt or learns from the mistake. Or doesn't - and goes bankrupt, eventually.

Open-source projects don't depend on sales. While this allows for experimental genres and fresh ideas, it also takes away some incentive to polish the product's user interface (bugs OTOH are more likely to be fixed).

But they do depend on volunteer developers. Natural selection is quite obviously in effect among OSS projects, only the criteria for success is the ability to attract developers rather than users. This can lead OSS in a different direction compared to closed source. In the long run though, the difference is not that great since most developers prefer to work on projects that people actually use.

Natural selection is quite obviously in effect among OSS projects, only the criteria for success is the ability to attract developers rather than users.

But the consequence of failure is very different. Nothing bad happens to the developer if no one is attracted to the project. In commercial games, one flop often means the company is shut down and you lose your job.

Open source and free are not mutually exclusive as most of us know.Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is free, but I don't think is open source. Maybe it is, it is based on either Q2 or Q3 engine, and Q2 engine is open sourced (or GPLed), maybe Q3 engine is as well.But anyway, it seems as if the summary equates open source with free and free with open source.

The Enemy Territory source code has been released, had it been considered I'm sure it would have come in in the #1 or #2 spot. ET is based on the Q3 engine, which has also been open sourced. Generally I'm not a fan of shooters, but I've probably spent thousands of hours playing ET. It may be that games that were developed with a closed source model and then later the source was released were not considered, I dunno, it's slashdotted.

Afaik, only the source to mod the game has been released, but no GPL-ed open source release (as has happened with all the previous id software engined titles)... But I'm positive we'll eventually be able to have a peek at that too.

Back on topic, I've played most of these games (except Alien Arena), and I always found it a bit disappointing to see what people created with access to the source: In the end (with some exceptions, such as Tremulous), most of these mods/total conversions just turn out to be ano

The in-game logic source code was released in 2004 to aid 'modders' but the game engine itself remains closed to this day (although it may eventually be released).

I know it sounds paradoxical but W:ET was never derived from GPL code (in the licensing sense) because id Tech 3 was under a closed license when it was licensed to SD (This may lead to issues with SD/Activision ever being able to relicense the source)

Free Software should be assumed to mean "free as in speech." Y'know, as in the Free Software Foundation. As in Richard Stallman's going to kick your ass. With a katana. (Now, where is that xkcd strip...)

I call that removing. If I can't access it in the GUI like I did with UT 3.7 it's a feature that has been removed.

Hell, the bots give more challenge than half the human opponents I play, and since I'm on a REALLY crappy connection since I moved out to California (Fuck you very much, Transedge!) I can't get other human players to join.

The common factor with all the games listed is that their code is GPL. UrT doesn't qualify as its game code is still closed source. Depending on your reading of the license, this may constitute a GPL violation.

Alternatively, it could just have been left off as it was written before UrT was released as a single (legally ambiguous, IMHO) package.

While the site seems to be down, here is a draft copy of the article text, I cleaned up the grammer before the actual post but didn't save that version because I was stupid. Original had pictures to keep you distracted.
About two weeks ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled "New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition" yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games. This was done in the same style as Barr's previous feature, "Tremulous: The best free software game ever?" which d

and I'm an idiot once again, proper formatting this time!! Here is my draft copy

About two weeks ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled "New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition" yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games. This was done in the same style as Barr's previous feature, "Tremulous: The best free software game ever?" which described Tremulous but also lacked comparisons and relations to other games. This feature hopes to be a thorough comparison of the major fr

TA is a little late. There's a new Sauerbraten available since a few days, and it is significantly improved over the previous available one. (don't ask me why this group doesn't use version numbers...)

Yes I know, the top of the article mentions that it was written two months ago. The release of the new Sauerbraten was what promoted me to post this before it got too out-of-date.

Also the end of the article contains the following note, "Notes: Since the original writing, Sauerbraten has released a new version that has more RPG elements and seems to make progress in being a more full-fledged game. I actually haven't had time to update the article." Perhaps I should have put that under the Sauerbraten secti

Which you do with any versioning scheme unless you have branches. Date-based versioning doesn't describe branches at all! Also doesn't allow for major and minor versions or for alpha or beta designations, which makes it harder to decide what to install and when to upgrade.

You realize that Ubuntu 7.10 is just the October 2007 release, right? the next version, 8.04, is the April 2008 release. Sauerbraten could make the version numbers more cryptic, but why? Sauerbraten doesn't HAVE minor revisions or alpha/beta versions. There is release, and there is svn, and that is all.

That's spelling though. Version 1 of his post had issues with spelling and grammar. Version 2 had the grammar fixed. Why are you complaining about the spelling in Version 2? Didn't you read the release notes? WAIT FOR VERSION 3! Bug reports concerning spelling for Version 2 WILL BE IGNORED.

I have yet to see one game that works correctly on a Linux box with Xinerama. At least in full-screen more. Some of them won't even let you change resolution at all, let alone tell them to run in a window.

When they run in full-screen they tend to span the displays and have all the action right in the middle so the important stuff is split in two.

And quite a few games crash on the weird resolution.

I'm not saying I've seen Windows games work on dual-head or ever support two monitors, but at least they have the decency to just pick a screen and use that one.

I'm not saying I've seen Windows games work on dual-head or ever support two monitors, but at least they have the decency to just pick a screen and use that one.

There are some titles for Windows that support multiple heads: Flight Simulator X, for example.X2 supports two monitors, but with the inexplicable requirement that your secondary monitor has to be to the right of the primary, cause they've hardcoded the screen edges for the mouse.

I've tried these three games. I'm a FPS fan and when I moved to Linux I wanted some free shooters, so I took a look at these three, in the order in the subject.
Nexuiz: Good but gameplay doesn't seem solid. The sound effects were pretty bad on my system at least and the weapons are weaker that Q3 I think. After a while I had this problem where all the textures were replaced by weird looking patterns and I gave up trying to fix it. An ok game but nothing really special.
Alien Arena: This is the first free

Alien Arena: This is the first free game that I played that I actually like and would play seriously. The controls are solid and the weapons are well-balanced.

The controls (I include the UI) are only as solid as Quake 2. I normally switch weapons through the mouse wheel since it's hard to memorize the number slots for the weapons across the massive number of FPS games. In Quake 2, you only see the current weapon selection - IIRC, there may have been an icon that showed you which weapon you were switching to.

The one time I tried Alien Arena was the same time I noticed this. After playing Quake 3 and UT, this isn't a feature I can play without. In fact, I coul

Wesnoth isn't an FPS. But it does have a story. I think that most OSS games will be about networked matches, because getting people to write netcode is probably easier than getting people to write an amazing story.

But seriously, in many ways I'm surprised at the lack of progress in the gaming areas.... the games do look quite mature, but nothing comes close to Crysis. One can argue that, yes, Crysis has huge dollars behind it. But open source games should never need to reinvent the wheel... doesn't that count for something? Shouldn't that mean the games evolve constantly from the same rich base?

I don't think games lend themselves to evolution very well. Consider the amount of money and time the commercial studios spend building new game engines virtually from scratch. Game engines tend to be engineered around specifics of gameplay, and while you can modify an engine to suit your particular game, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate updates to the core engine. And an engine that's even just two or three years old results in a game that looks and feels decidedly dated.

Which will be a) 3 months after Duke Nukem 4ever,or alternatively accompanied by the HUGE disappointment about another overhyped game failing.Just really look at the meat thats been shown about spore, and ignore the talk (which is all bullshit): A series of nearly unreleated minigames, where your great design of the species doesnt play any kind of role besides being cosmetic.

The funny thing about user-created content (and it really shows in every single one of these examples) is that the maps tend to look incredibly bland and undetailed - not to mention these in particular look like they're all based on the Quake 3 engine, circa 2001.

Apparently building a game with AI and Free Software are incompatible for the time being: I don't know any Free SW games which has an AI say equivalent to the quality of Half-Life (the first) for example.

It might sound like a troll, or my question might answer itself, but why bother with trying to create FOSS FPSes, considered how high the big game studios set the bar in the FPS domain? Sure, the effort behind Sauerbrauten is admirable, but what does it bring? What sets it apart from the Quake, Unreal, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Deux Ex, Soldier of Fortune series? Its price?

Here's my point : we have limited means, limited resources, there's only so much quality content we can create, FAR less than big game st

They are all just quake 2 or quake 3 clones with replaced graphics, as far as i can tell. Well, Nexuiz implemented some of the thinsg that don't suck about Unreal Tournament.. but still.. pretty much just a Q2 clone.

The engine has enough stuff in it that it can bring my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo to it's knees, though.. but the art pipeline isn't near good enough to make it look like it should be doing that.

the problem with myminicity (and indeed most such sites before it) is that they do not consider it spamming. In fact, throwing that URL out as much as you can - on your blog, on forums, in your feeds, by IM and so forth and so on is the whole -point- of that site... as it is visits that cause the 'city' to grow.Good luck finding rules on where a 'player' is allowed to post the URL(s). Even more luck to you finding a 'report abuse' page or contact address. Good luck getting any response whatsoever from co

I know, but emails to abuse will get ignored too, since it's not an attack and it's not originating from their IP block. Really, it's an issue slashdot needs to fix with this whole link redirect trend.

I think that's a little unfair to say when most retail games have multi-million dollar budgets and these games are made by volunteers.
I can't guess as to whether you went to college or not, but most colleges have a competitive formula SAE team [wikipedia.org]. The team is made up entirely of volunteers, and some of the primary goals for being in such a project is to learn more about what goes into building a functional vehicle and for sheer fun -- it's

Maybe because a game is not just a piece of software and most decent games have hundreds of full time graphics programmers, mission designers, texture artists, concept artists, AI programmers, skybox artists, effects artists, animation engineers, networking programmers etc. These kind of resources just aren't available to open source games, at least not to the same level as commercial games.

Err no
I wish that wasn't true but it is. I'm a FOSS game developer, this month a saw a musician advertise himself on one FOSS gaming site and he was asked by at least three different projects to work for them. Programmers outnumber artist something like 10-1 or 100-1. Most of them are not Geeks or Nerds like us programmers who spend our life on the Internet. They seem to be in different communities and speak in different groups to us. Not to say we don't get along with them they are just not like us. Also

Unless you're really trying to push the limits of your target platform hard, programming is a drop in the bucket compared to the work done by the artists and level designers. The level designers probably have more to do with good gameplay than the programmers.

Level design is also a REALLY tedious process. Making a good level requires replaying the level over and over slightly tweaking things to get them just right. It gets old fast, and you get really sick of the level in the process. And of course you have to deal with the issues that come up from playing the level that many times. It's very easy to memorize the level you're working on, and end up making the level way too difficult because of that.

Oh absolutely, I didn't realize how essential level design was until Nexuiz's mappack was released. It was basically a rehash of a lot of older quake maps (that I personally would not have had the chance to come into contact with), and they were very noticeably more playable than anything I'd ever seen in that game. Which isn't to say that I didn't like the original Nexuiz maps, but these were much more natural to learn and frag in.

I know what you mean. But if you think about it, a good part of open source software is filling a "need." There is a need for a java IDE that has x features. There is a need for a full featured text editor with extra utilities for editing code. There is a need for convenience installers for linux programs. There is a need for games. Wait, what kind of games?
There is where it becomes very open ended and not well defined. The passion of wanting to develop an open source application to fulfill a need

"most of these shooters would be considered pretty good...in 1996."Unfortunately, the same can be said of most modern commercial games as well. They've all turned into insanely expensive incremental updates on the same game play. Game companies need one of three things (and possibly all three):

1) An innovative new gaming genre along the lines of the switch from 2D to 3D. I'm not holding my breath here. Nintendo has come closest to this with the Wii controller, but this was a glancing blow, and won't las

Yes Quake 3 is free software, but Quake3 can't be called a packagable 'game' in the sense of 'free'. The game materials are still proprietary and not free. The engine is free software, and in fact, all the games on that list use GPL engine that were built on iD's released Quake1/2/3 engines. However they also can be considered packagable 'games' with free content. The article should have made that distinction though.

Play it again. A coordinated team of humans are great. It depends on one thing though. When Sudden Death occurs, the humans should still be able to build armouries, as the aliens are still able to evolve.

Great game. Just finished a round right now. Best game I've played in *years*

I played many games over a several days. I almost never saw the humans win unless there was a huge skill stack on the human side. Far more often I saw the aliens win, and occasionally a sudden death which inevitably went to the aliens.

What was the most frustrating for me was not being able to buy upgrades or evolve because I hadn't killed enough people yet. Especially at later stages in the game where practically everybody had evos and upgrades, it was incredibly difficult and frustrating running around

Well, money's just one of the many, many, MANY problems I have with Counter-Strike, including the other one you brought up. Yes, you can do a pistol round to save up more money, but the very idea of a counter-terrorism organization sending an operative into a situation with just a pistol and no body armor is ridiculous to me. It wouldn't be as bad if the game had a less realistic tone to it (i.e. TF2), but as it is the bizarre mix of attempted realism (including incredibly annoying things like weapons that

If the sides are asymmetrical, you introduce a mechanic that forces both teams to play each side over the course of a match and whoever performs better over the course of playing both sides is declared the winner. This is basic game design here. If Team A wins as aliens in 8:47 and after switching sides Team B wins in 10:47, that doesn't mean "both teams have won," that means "Team A won faster so they win the match." This is a mechanic that needs to be introduced into the game itself to reinforce this conc

Exacto-friggin-lutely. I've always liked the Mario Kart approach to game balance. Where Counter-Strike consciously emphasizes the difference in skill between the two teams, Mario Kart tries to minimize it by giving better powerups and more speed to the players in the back of the pack, creating a close and competitive race even between players of different skill levels. This keeps the game fun and exciting for all players instead of simply handing an easy victory to the better player. Lopsided games are *nev

My problem with one-hits in general is that if you give someone any way at ALL to create a one-hit opportunity, certain players will spend all of their time figuring out how to abuse it. The spy's invisibility power gives him the ability to run behind a line of rushing players, uncloak and eliminate them all nearly instantly. There's no way to defend against this short of reducing the effectiveness of your rush by having everyone be constantly watching where they came from instead of concentrating on the en

As engy it's pretty easy to keep your back to a wall and keep your eyes peeled. As most other classes you're moving around the map leaving territory behind you that a spy can use to get into your blind spot. The problem is that if you're constantly checking your blind spot, you become more vulnerable to enemies in front of you. It's a no-win situation.

Well that seals the deal for me. I won't even bother trying Tremulous because I tried Natural Selection and thought it was awful.Mind you this was a few years back; I don't know how much has changed in that time. But NS to me took the concept of twitch reflexes to such an extreme that it was completely unenjoyable. I just read on the Tremulous forums about how their recommendation is that your mouse sensitivity should be set up so that you can do a full 240 degree spin with a single hand swipe. My god I

Don't get Warsow either. It left in all the movement quirks of the Quake engine that you saw NS players using and even adds a few more, so to be decent you have to spend all your spare time practicing movement skills. A lot of the game too is switching weapons depending on the situation, and because of all the movement the appropriate weapon for the situation can change every couple seconds. The upside is that you can take a lot of damage so there's no real WTF "moments" as much as WTF "spans of several sec

I am sorry, but what do you want to show us with that shots? How good or how bad the game looks?The first one has a butt-ugly creature in front of Gray Plastic Tunnels (tM). The second one had the worlds edgeiest curve and gray in gray.Looks like quake 1 in high-res...

My main wish is that the Galaxy game browser could sort servers based on the number of real players. It's annoying as hell selecting each game of 4+ "players" to see that all but one of them have 0 ping.